


i'm gone, call me major tom

by jonez



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, Minor Injuries, little bit of a sappy fic sorry :(, uhhh. i don't know how to describe the type of au this is.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 22:24:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16206884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonez/pseuds/jonez
Summary: (alternatively titled, twenty-three versions of denouement and one version of something else entirely.)It happens a lot, you suppose.





	i'm gone, call me major tom

**Author's Note:**

> hi! okay. yeah. i write a lot of rusame but this is the first one i'm posting. hope you enjoy! i don't think there's any particular warnings you have to look out for but if you get through reading and there's something else you think i should add please let me know! yeah. okay. enjoy! sorry if i take this down in like an hour.

The first time, you pass him on the street, and that’s the extent of it.

 

You’re walking to your job. It’s mid-winter, which means you’ve pulled your scarf over your mouth, gloved hands buried in your coat pockets. Your messenger bag is hanging over your back, and apparently you’d forgotten to close it when you’d left your place that morning, because you feel the contents shift when someone knocks shoulders with you.

 

You keep walking for a minute. You’ve mastered the art of staring straight ahead with a set jaw and dark glower while on the streets, and you’re not going to sacrifice that because someone knocks shoulders with you on the street and you feel your bag lose some of its weight. Which, in hindsight, is very stupid.

 

“Hey, dude!” You keep walking for a moment. “With the scarf!”

 

You huff, stop, and turn. The someone you’d bumped into is clutching onto a dark, faded wallet that you instantly recognize as yours. He looks about your age, maybe, with a woolen hat pulled low over wild blonde hair, glasses foggy with the biting cold air, and cheeks faintly flushed. The man he’s been walking with turns too, looking vaguely irritated under his own messy bangs and thick brows.

 

“This yours?” He asks, and you nod, once. He strides up to you, drops the wallet into your waiting hand, and says, “Be more careful in the future, my guy!”

 

You cock your head to the side. “Thanks,” you mutter, and he smiles a dopey smile and nods, and then he turns and walks away.

 

It doesn’t take long for you to forget the encounter. You don’t see him again.

 

-

 

The second time, you’re at an arts school for photography.

 

A new student arrives at the beginning of your junior year, which is strange and not something that happens often, according to your older sister and her girlfriend who are both seniors. He’s an American transfer in your very same department. He’s got an annoying cocky grin and a shitty aviator jacket with patches decorating the sleeves and a camera bag littered with buttons and pins. He also doesn’t ever use the darkroom unless he has a digital negative to print and has to scam some paper off of you, which annoys you beyond words because, _c’mon_ , this paper isn’t exactly in abundance and he can just print black and white off the digital printer in the computer room, right?

 

But he says he likes spending time in the darkroom, which you suppose makes sense. You love the darkroom, the chemical scent that lingers in your nose, watching the photos develop, scanning contact sheets by dim light. You suppose you see the use in digital cameras, but you are devoted to film and he knows this well. Which is probably why he only ever goes into the darkroom when you’re there, and begs you for help with approximating the time to print photos because he is _phenomenally terrible_ at it. (That, or he's faking not knowing how filters work to get you to help him, which doesn't make any sense so you push the thought out of your head.)

 

Over the next two years, the two of you grow close. It’s partially due to the moments in the darkroom when he looks over what you’re drying with a stunned expression, partially due to the way to the times he drags you into the computer room and you watch with a cock to your head as he perfects already fascinating photographs in Photoshop, partially due to the moments off-campus. It’s a combination of things, really. Sometimes, in these off-campus moments, you catch yourself watching him more than you watch for potential shots. You never find out if he notices this or not. You like to think not. You like to think he would have done something if he had, but maybe he wouldn’t have.

 

In the end, it doesn’t matter. He vanishes after senior year, leaving nothing but an envelope slipped under your door your final day on-campus containing one of the photos you’d given him and a barely legible address scribbled on the back. You don't ever check the address. If he couldn't tell you in person that last day, it likely doesn't matter.

 

Regardless, you don’t hear from him again.

 

(You see his name a few times, in various articles while boredly procrastinating actual work. You pretend that’s not the reason when your younger sister asks why you’ve been staring at the laptop screen for the past ten minutes.)

 

-

 

The third time, you pass him while boarding a flight to Moscow.

 

It’s mid-spring. You’re heading back home after visiting an old friend in Beijing. He’s standing in a neatly-pressed blue pilot’s uniform, hands folded behind his back, exchanging quiet words with one of the flight attendants, and he smiles a pleasant smile and nods at you as you pass. He’s not standing there when you’re exiting the plane. You almost miss the smile, but you forget about him as soon as you spot your younger sister waiting outside the terminal.

 

That’s it. Sometimes, that’s all there is.

 

-

 

You’re long dead, nonexistent footsteps trailing behind you, the fourth time.

 

You’re not really sure what you’re haunting. Whatever, _whoever_ killed you is long dead by the time he comes around, and your older sister has passed too, and you’re not sure what happened to your younger sister. She must’ve left after your death. So now you linger, vaguely wandering your hometown’s snowy parks, and then there’s a boy walking through one some night.

 

It must be cold. He’s huffing into his hands and rubbing them together, trembling periodically, eyes red-rimmed, an old jacket pulled tight around his shoulders. His hand is shaking when he brushes snow off an old swing and sinks into it, using the toes of boots that hardly look broken in to rock himself back and forth as he returns to huffing into his hands. He hasn’t seen you, but you see him, because you guess that comes with being a ghost. You see most things, and you want to help him, but you’ve long accepted that you can’t do much in the way of helping.

 

“Hello,” you say anyway, impassively and flatly, because no one ever hears you.

 

Except _he_ does.

 

He looks up, straight at you, blue eyes wide, clearly alarmed, and then this go-round is over. (For you, at least.)

 

-

 

You don’t meet him the fifth time.

 

At least, not in any form amounting to more than various missing persons posters put up by his brother, who looks like him but taller, with greasy blonde waves that fall over his ears and constant dark bruises under his eyes and a slouch to his posture. You make eye contact with him, once, while he’s taping one up on the coffee shop your older sister owns. The brother looks desperate. It’s a sharp contrast to the cheery smile his twin, whose grinning face provokes a weird twisting sensation in your gut, wears in the posters.

 

You wonder what happened to him. Eventually, his brother comes around and takes the posters down. You don’t meet his eyes when you ask, in a low voice, if they found him.

 

His brother balls the missing persons poster into a tight clump, and throws it at the sidewalk as if he’s trying to drill to the core of the Earth with a crumpled poster and the force of his own shaking hand alone. He doesn’t answer you.

 

You don’t forget about the boy in the missing persons poster, not really. More posters of others go up over time, but none of them stick with you the way his does.

 

-

 

The sixth time, you’ve been drifting hopelessly through space for years.

 

You think you’re dying, and it’s not like the previous times you’ve thought you were dying. Which happens a lot, actually. You suppose that comes with losing contact with Earth and being forced to watch as your ship breaks down around you. This time, though, it’s different. The air filters are faltering, and there are none to replace them, says the tired boy with brown hair that falls to his chin, and even he is unable to come up with a way to adjust. The soil in the green room has been seeped of any chance for synthetic plant life again, says your older sister, and even she cannot magically change this. The engines are dying, says the German mechanic with the messy bird’s nest of hair and red eyes underlined by bruises, and even he is unable to revive them.

 

So you send transmission after transmission into the void, sitting in the captain’s seat in the cockpit with your legs folded on the seat, watching stars drift slowly past as your voice cracks out the same message _over_ and _over_ again.

 

And then, while you’re sending another useless transmission into space, hoping for some small sign that you’re not completely alone in this blank expanse, there’s a response.

 

It’s his voice. It’s salvation. You never do get past this association.

 

-

 

The seventh time is the first time he feels familiar.

 

You meet him in college. His physics professor is the same professor you’re assisting, and you meet him the third day of classes, and when he takes his hand in yours and shakes it fervently, you think this is how it’s supposed to be. He doesn’t stop beaming throughout your entire first conversation, and maybe it’s that broad grin and that half-endearing half-annoying laugh that provoke you into exchanging numbers.

 

And so you make plans. You get coffee the next week. Coffee becomes a recurring thing, meeting up almost daily in shitty little cafes to snark at one another over schoolwork. And then coffee turns into occasional movies weeks after their release so that you can watch it in a near-empty theater, and movies turn into nights in his dorm or your apartment, and maybe it’s no real surprise that that turns into actual dating.

 

You don’t call ever it that, even when he accidentally drops the ring while trying to produce it on your sixth anniversary at some fancy restaurant he’d insisted on and yells, “Shit!” loud enough to make every head in the building turn and scowl.

 

You say yes. You also stop recalling this time here. The rest just makes you sad.

 

-

 

The eighth time, you pass him in a hospital waiting room.

 

He’s sitting in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs with his knees tucked under his chin, arms crossed in front of his face and hiding all but a mussed mess of blonde hair, and you, who has been in and out of the hospital for months visiting your father, know the feeling.

 

“Who is it,” you ask flatly, muffled through the scarf over your mouth, and he looks up, glasses smudged and eyes puffy. He seems to be considering whether to reply for a moment, and then he sniffs.

 

“Boyfriend,” he answers. It sounds like he’s talking through cotton. You feel a pang. You don’t know why, not this time.

 

“He’ll be okay.”

 

“I hope so,” he murmurs, and then he swallows hard.

 

You want to say something more comforting. Then your last name is called and you pick the obligatory flowers you’d brought up off the table and follow the nurse at the door. He’s not there when you’re leaving. You don’t see him again.

 

Your father dies during his third surgery. Your older sister curls up in a chair and buries her face in her knees because _what the hell is she supposed to do now_. It reminds you of him. You should be crying, too, but memories of your father swim in your head and instead all you can think about is him and whatever happened to his boyfriend.

 

You hope they turned out okay.

 

-

 

You’re in high school the ninth time.

 

The British kid who’s the president of the Book Club and only ever recommends Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia wants to set up a tabletop role-playing game, but he wants to play Dungeons & Dragons and you physically can’t let him do that. So you talk him into another system, and he invites his weird “friend” with the messy blonde hair and the wide blue eyes and the smudged glasses and the letterman jacket. You’ve seen him around, you suppose.

 

Your only real friend, who’s shorter than you and is trying harder than anyone you know and barely makes time for TTRPGs between shifts at his two jobs, hates him, but you think the fact that his character is Dwayne Johnson as a cat-person is entertaining.

 

The fact that he leads you to believe he’s on the football team, forces you to attend the first game, and reveals he is not, in fact, on the football team but merely likes shouting about whatever’s going on on the field is less entertaining. You kiss him on your way to your car anyway. He grins into it.

 

The two of you date for a year. He leaves for college, and you don’t speak to him again until four years later, when he’s crashing in said British kid’s apartment while trying to get a job and visiting the ice cream parlor the two of you used to frequent at the very same time that you’re in town visiting your older sister. You see him at the counter, ordering exactly what he used to, and you nearly fall over in your impulsive shout to him, embarrassing yourself beyond words.

 

He thinks it’s cute, he tells you later with a laugh. You pick up where you left off. This run is one of the best, you think.

 

-

 

The tenth time, you’ve been talking to him online for years.

 

You’d met in the YouTube comments section of a Silent Hill speed-run, argued for over  two hundred comments about what the speed-runner could have done better, ignored all other commenters, and finally wound up exchanging other social media accounts. You visit him the summer you’re due for college. It’s a seven hour drive for both of you.

 

It’s a good week.

 

You try to keep in contact over the next year, and then he goes silent. You message him everywhere you can think. He never answers. At one point, you get a reply on Facebook, and you’re immediately rushing to respond, and then you find out that it’s actually his brother deactivating the account and you never work up the nosiness to ask what happened.

 

You wind up worrying almost every day until you can’t worry about it anymore.

 

-

 

The eleventh time is weird.

 

You’re both representatives of nations, you think. It’s not fun. It feels like the longest run by far, and probably is. Everyone hurts and gets hurt, every place conceivable is destroyed over and over again, everything dies. You don’t feel like a person most days. You don’t think about whether he fares better. You have too many worries in this one to think about him much until he becomes your main worry, and then you feel a mild guilt for never having worried before.

 

This time is one of the worst. You don’t think about it when you can help it.

 

-

 

The twelfth time, he’s visiting his brother for the summer.

 

You and your sisters and your mother have been living here for over ten years, and you’re going into junior year, and he shows up because his parents kicked him out for the summer. On your second shift at the local convenience store, he shows up, gets a wild cherry slushie, and starts showing up everyday after that. He only gets blue raspberry slushies after the first few times, though.

 

“Why only blue raspberry now?” you ask one afternoon, squinting against the lazy sunlight streaming in through the glass storefront as you hand him back cash.

 

He grins sheepishly. “I’m a little bit allergic to the red dye in wild cherry.”

 

You quirk a brow. “And you just found that out here?”

 

“No, I knew before.”

 

“And you still got a wild cherry slushie?”

 

“I forgot,” he says, and chances you another sheepish grin. You hate to admit that you smile a genuine smile back.

 

Some time after this, he asks if you’d like to go see a movie. You pause to consider it, and then agree, because why the hell not? He’s going back at the end of the summer, and you don’t have any plans except for shifts here, and, _really_ , you think he’s fun.

 

The rest of the summer is one of your best.

 

-

 

The thirteenth time is bloody.

 

That’s most of it. He cleans up your wounds, and you clean up his, and sometimes you let touches linger and that’s the extent of it. There’s nothing more to be said. Sometimes you catch yourself staring, but this time is harsh and it wouldn’t be fair to either of you, because there is no good to be had this time. He’s not like the version of himself he is every other time. This version is tired and running on constant fumes, and he grins often but almost never with any real joy behind it. You don’t blame him. You’re the same way.

 

This run is worse even than the eleventh. You wonder if thirteen really is an unlucky number.

 

-

 

The fourteenth time is a good run.

 

You meet him on a stupid foreign road trip your older sister and her girlfriend are dragging you and her girlfriend’s weird best friend along for. Your older sister is excitable, but she’s not a good driver, and neither are you, really, which means her girlfriend, who has long brown hair that falls into curls over her shoulders, and her girlfriend’s friend, who’s albino and speaks with a fairly heavy German accent, switch driving duty.

 

He’s working at one of the few all-night diners the four of you risk. You call him the name that’s on his nametag, even though it doesn’t seem like it suits him, and he offers you a grin and says that’s not his nametag. You ask why he’s wearing it, easing your chin into your palm. He responds with an exaggerated wink and writes down what all of you order for drinks.

 

At the end of the meal, after a dinner of greasy highway diner food that no one in their right mind should eat, he leaves a number on the receipt and hands it to you. You keep it. The number, anyway -- your sister has to pay for the meal.

 

When you reach Houston and the former NASA complex, something you and you alone had begged to stop and see, you call him. You’re not really sure why. You get some odd nagging feeling in the back of your mind telling he’d be interested in this. And he is.

 

You meet up with him, briefly, outside the airport before your flight back. He tells you to call him when you’ve landed, looking you up and down with a slight tilt to his head and a smile on his face.

 

So you do.

 

This, too, is amidst the better times.

 

-

 

The fifteenth time is bloody too, but bloody with the scent of decay, with a perpetual rot that sinks into everything.

 

It’s probably because of the zombies.

 

You meet him in the New York countryside, having been travelling with a completely inept Italian you met the first day. He’s driving a battered old military Jeep, some other man asleep in the passenger’s seat with a jacket thrown over him, and he slows down to pick the two of you up, which is mostly because your companion starts waving his hands and shouting. You briefly consider killing him and the man asleep in the passenger’s seat and taking the Jeep and their supplies, but then he shoots your companion and you a genuine grin and strikes up a conversation about pre-apocalypse comic books and it’s a relief to be around someone whose thoughts don’t just flit between whether or not you’ll die today and various types of pasta.

 

(Apparently, your companion knows about more than those two things, because the man who’d been asleep in the passenger’s seat seems fond of him. It’s from that man that you find out that the two of them had been stationed on an Air Force base and have been trying to reach a base in Maine.)

 

You get close to him here, too. Eventually, though, you die.

 

You suppose he follows some time after that.

 

-

 

On number sixteen, he’s the ghost.

 

You move into a house in some suburb to get away from your old school, and after a while, he shows up. He’s around your age here, and he doesn’t say much, which you suppose is part of being a ghost. When he does talk, it’s low, and rapid, and excitable, and it makes you grin.

 

“How’d you die?” you ask once, on impulse, because you notice the dark blotch on his shirt again and you’re curious.

 

He glances at you, brings a mostly see-through hand to his chest, and looks away.

 

You don’t ever get an answer to this question, really. Your family moves out a few years later, because your younger sister gets into a fistfight with some kid in her grade at school and winds up putting him in the hospital. You don’t see your ghost again.

 

When you get older, you forget about the ghost in your old suburban home. You don’t know when he moves on.

 

-

 

In the seventeenth go-round, you’re neighbors in what is quite possibly the shittiest apartment building in the world.

 

To make matters worse than the persistent stench of smoke and _other things_ , the frequent insect infestations, and the constant leaks of water that is not quite clear enough for comfort, you live right above the boiler. You don’t even know why buildings still have boilers. Maybe it’s just an old building. Either way, your landlord is an overbearing piece of shit who charges more than you signed on depending on his mood, and you’re barely gritting your teeth through another month there when he moves in.

 

Of course, he doesn’t have the ability to change the landlord’s price, and sometimes he plays shitty folk bands loud enough that you can hear it through the thin walls, but he’s got a nice smile and you invite him over for tea or coffee a couple times. You don’t learn much more about him than that. You move out a few months after he moves in, and your phone breaks and you never get his number back.

 

In retrospect, this isn’t the saddest life you’ve known him in.

 

-

 

The eighteenth time feels mostly cliché.

 

You’re working at a Starbucks to try to pay off your tuition, and he comes in when autumn is just beginning. The wind carries a faint crisp chill, the leaves are going shades of red and orange and brown, and he comes in wearing a big jacket and with a pink face that suggests he is not made for even the barest amount of cold. You recognize him, vaguely -- you think you take classes in the same departments, or something.

 

That day is slow. The only other barista there is asleep in the back, so you take his order and make it. It’s a hot chocolate. You don’t know why, but you mindlessly doodle a heart beside his name when you’re writing it. You blink at it for a moment, hope he won’t notice, and call his name out. He takes the drink and makes for the door with an enthusiastic but hurried wish for you to have a nice day, and apparently hears your wish for he makes no mention of it.

 

He’s there when you come in one day, orders the same thing, darts out without staying to drink it. This becomes the tradition.

 

One day, because he doesn’t seem to ever notice what you write and you think he has a cute-in-a-stupid-way air about him, you scribble your number below his name. When you don’t get any texts or calls from unfamiliar numbers, you _almost_ feel disappointed before bitterly reminding yourself that he probably hasn’t ever even noticed that it’s always you behind the counter when he’s there and there’s nothing to feel disappointed over.

 

And then he shows up the next day, out-of-breath, and fishes the cardboard holder that you wrote it on out of his pocket, points at a number, and says that he couldn’t tell whether that was a one or a seven and didn’t want to text the wrong one with something stupid and asks if he could get it _for real_ now.

 

You give it to him.

 

-

 

On attempt nineteen, you accidentally hit him with your car.

 

You guess not being a good driver is in your genes across all these attempts or something, because you’re not paying attention, and neither is he. You’re digging around for your bag on the floorboard of the empty passenger’s seat, and you take your foot slightly off the brake, and the car starts to slip forward, and you frantically look up when you feel the car hit something. You slam it into park, jump out, and look at him in horror.

 

When he wakes up at the hospital, he finds it incredibly funny. To the point where he laughs off any attempt at an apology with an idle wave of his hand, and winds up taking your palm and writing a number using a doctor’s Sharpie pen on your wrist before paying the bills and leaving.

 

You have to ask your younger sister to help you read off the number, because he'd written it upside down relative to you, but you _do_ call.

 

-

 

On number twenty, you’ve been friends for years.

 

You meet in grade school, because you have recess at the same time and he always claims the top of the monkey bars for himself. Then you climb up, declare that you should get one half and he keeps the other, and, to your surprise, he agrees.

 

You stay friends for the rest of grade school, through middle school, right up into high school until he finds a date in the quiet kid with dark hair who spends class periods with his nose buried in a sketchbook. And then you find your gut twisting everytime they sit together and try to ignore the why of that.

 

You’re told they break up amicably between junior and senior year, and the relief and subsequent realization crashes into you like a semi-truck. You never really bring yourself to do anything about it.

 

One night before summer ends, he asks you if you want to park up on the hill just outside town and stargaze before the two of you go to opposite ends of the country for college. You agree, because you want to do that just one last time, and when you’re parked up there in his shitty Jeep and you’re laying on the hood of his car, legs dangling off the front, you’re hyper-aware of the fact that you’re watching him. You don’t try to stop.

 

He doesn’t point it out. What he does say, in a low mutter, is, “Why didn’t you ever try?”

 

“Try what,” you ask, even though it feels obvious what he’s asking.

 

He pauses. “I... I think it would’ve been good. We could’ve worked, I think.”

 

You don’t know how to answer, so you keep watching him, the way he worries his lower lip between his teeth. He glances back at you.

 

“Another time, huh, dude?” he says, punctuating the half-hearted question with a light, forced laugh.

 

He doesn’t know, and neither do you, that it does work out another time. A couple of other times, in fact.

 

-

 

Number twenty-one is dumb, because you’re a theatre kid.

 

You’ve been with this company for ages, though, and you’re basically guaranteed the lead in most shows. And then along he comes, shows up at the auditions for a production of some big-name murder mystery, and he snags the role right from under you with his stupid, broad smile and his stupid, soft hair and his stupid, enthusiastic voice.

 

You spend most of the rehearsal process watching him bitterly. And then on opening night, he takes your hand between both of his and tells you to break a leg, beaming with all the force of every star you’ve ever found in the telescope on the balcony of your apartment. And you’re taken aback, but you nod and mutter it back, and you understand.

 

The next show, you’re cast as love interests. You suppose you can see where that becomes something approaching a real relationship.

 

In any case, in terms of clichés, this is one of your favorites.

 

-

 

Number twenty-two reminds you of times thirteen and fifteen most, except worse in some ways.

 

There’s a fog hanging over anything, and everything serves to act as a constant reminder that there really isn’t any goddamn way out. It’s always the generators, always the unnatural hooks and the claws, and always the sense of _something_ out there, trying to get you.

 

(And sometimes it does.)

 

The good part is that in the few moments there aren’t those things, he lets his head fall against your shoulder and you press a kiss into his hair and try to milk every idle feeling and fleeting thought of normal domesticity you can get out of the contact.

 

You don’t care to remember how this one ends. Eventually it becomes an endless blur. You probably die for good. That’s the only thing that makes sense.

 

-

 

The last time, he passes you on the street, and that’s the extent of it.

 

It’s the middle of summer, and he’s wearing a jacket with the sleeves rolled up, talking eagerly to someone walking beside him. You can hear him from yards away, could probably hear him if you were all the way across town. His hands are buried in the jacket’s pockets, and you roll your eyes, because _Christ_ , can’t people be a little quieter on the streets?

 

In any case, he takes them out to throw his hands up in some overzealous gesture that nearly hits his companion with thick eyebrows and a sullen expression in the face, and you notice something falls from his pocket. He keeps walking. You pause, huff, and kneel down to pick it up.

 

It’s a wallet, with an iron-on patch depicting some superhero emblem that you can’t place. You blink at it, and then look back at him, still gesturing enthusiastically to convey some point you can’t hope to understand to the shorter man at his side.

 

“Hey,” you call, “You, with the jacket.”

 

He doesn’t appear to hear you, still gesturing. His companion elbows him in the arm, nods back at you, and he looks around, catches your eye confusedly. And then his gaze lands on the wallet. “Oh,” he says, and he doesn’t seem remotely embarrassed. “That’s mine! Toss it to me?”

So you do. He fumbles to catch it, flashes you a lopsided grin that makes your heart do a funny thing. “Be more careful,” you say, and before he can reply, you turn away and keep walking, pulling your scarf up over your mouth.

 

-

 

It’s cold, is the first thing you notice.

 

You open your eyes. It’s very bleak. There’s nothing in any direction but more of the same. Your ears are ringing a persistent ring. You’re not quite sure where you are.

 

Once the ringing stops, you look around, and see him there. He must be a couple yards away from you, standing on the same surface suspended in this blank expanse that you’re sitting on. He’s cocking his head to the side in that familiar way, messy hair falling over his smudged glasses, hands buried in the pockets of his shitty aviator jacket with the patches that are all too familiar.

 

It comes back to you all at once. Every go-round, more of them than you can possibly hope to gather in a coherent story, comes flooding back in. Every time you saw him. It’s almost overwhelming. Your throat feels tight. He hasn’t changed. You don’t think you have. It’s hard to tell. Maybe you have. It doesn’t matter. He recognizes you, at least you think he does, because he parts his lips in a smile, looking you up and down.

 

“Ivan,” he says, as if in greeting, which you guess it kind of is, and you swallow and get to your feet, try to ignore the odd warmth bubbling in your chest at hearing your name roll off his tongue.

 

“Alfred,” you reply, and his grin only grows, and you offer the biggest smile you can manage without feeling like you’ll start to cry.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed, happy trails!


End file.
